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☆ Biden Tries to Close a Loophole
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-05 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

President Biden’s latest executive actions on immigration are an attempt to shrink a loophole that has allowed many people to enter the country without legal permission. That loophole is the asylum system. Not as intendedThe modern idea of asylum stems from World War II. Today, many migrants claim asylum even though they are not at risk of being persecuted. They instead want to move to the U.S. — understandably enough — because it is a richer, politically freer and less violent place than much of the world.

Persons: Biden’s, — Locations: South Sudanese

☆ Mexico Elects Claudia Sheinbaum
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-03 | by ( David Leonhardt | Ian Prasad Philbrick | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When foreigners hear news from Mexico, it can often sound chaotic, involving cartels, crime or migration surges. But last night’s election results make clear that most Mexicans are pleased with their country’s direction. Claudia Sheinbaum — the former mayor of Mexico City and the chosen successor of the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador — won the presidency easily. Sheinbaum, a leftist-leaning engineer, received about 58 percent of the vote, to around 29 percent for Xóchitl Gálvez, a centrist entrepreneur, and about 11 percent for Jorge Álvarez Máynez, a progressive candidate. In today’s newsletter, we’ll explain why most Mexican citizens have been so satisfied with López Obrador (who’s often known by his initials, AMLO) and what challenges Sheinbaum will likely face, starting with violent crime, which is indeed a major problem.

Persons: Claudia Sheinbaum —, Andrés Manuel López Obrador —, Gálvez, Jorge Álvarez Máynez, López Obrador, Sheinbaum Locations: Mexico, Mexico City

☆ The Conviction of Donald J. Trump
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-31 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The criminal justice system finally caught up to Donald Trump. First, he was a New York businessman whose company violated discrimination laws, failed to repay debts and flirted with bankruptcy. Yesterday, however, a criminal jury judged Trump for the first time. The prosecutors argued that Trump had falsified business records to hide a sexual affair from voters and corrupt the 2016 election. Trump has become the first former president of the United States to be a convicted felon.

Persons: Donald Trump, Trump Locations: New York, Georgia, Manhattan, United States

☆ Patriotism, Diversity and the Election
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-30 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Student debt. One is the contrast between the country’s most heated political debates and the top concerns of most voters. Student debt and housing costs make for a useful comparison. Student debt, a subject that the Biden administration has emphasized, may seem like the ultimate pocketbook issue. In reality, it’s more niche: Only 18 percent of U.S. adults have any federal student debt.

Persons: Biden Organizations: Democratic Locations: Gaza, U.S

☆ Democrats Who Are Winning
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-29 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Recent polls contain a surprising combination of results: Democrats appear to be leading in six tough Senate races even as President Biden trails Donald Trump in the same states. What are these Democratic Senate candidates doing right? In today’s newsletter, I’ll highlight the single biggest theme that emerged: The six Democrats are basing their campaigns around a populism that harshly criticizes both big business and China. (In a follow-up newsletter, I’ll look at several other campaign themes.) Still, most of the Democrats in these races aren’t merely ahead in the polls; they also have a track record of winning tough races by appealing to voters who are skeptical of the Democratic Party.

Persons: Biden, Donald Trump, It’s Organizations: Democratic, Democratic Party Locations: China

☆ Addressing Immigration
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-23 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

President Biden and his aides describe this year’s election as crucial — existential, even — because of Donald Trump’s hostility to democracy. Yet given the election’s importance, the Biden administration has been notably slow to address one of his biggest political vulnerabilities: immigration. Polls show that immigration is a top concern of voters, often trailing only the economy. Most voters are unhappy with Biden’s handling of the issue and say they trust Trump more on it. Despite this situation, the White House has been reluctant to act aggressively for most of the past few years.

Persons: Biden, Donald Trump’s, Trump Organizations: Democratic, White, Politico

☆ The Rise of a New Centrism
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-20 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Washington, you often hear, is a place so polarized that our leaders barely get anything done. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a progressive leader, has worked on legislation with several conservative Senate Republicans, including Josh Hawley and J.D. My editors recently asked me to make sense of this conundrum: A polarized country in which bipartisanship has somehow become normal. To do so, I spoke with Congress members from both parties, as well as Biden administration officials and outside experts. I emerged from the project believing that the U.S. was indeed a polarized country in many ways — but less polarized than people sometimes think.

Persons: Biden —, Donald Trump’s, —, Elizabeth Warren, Josh Hawley, J.D, Vance, Lina Khan —, Biden, ” Biden, bipartisanship Organizations: Democrats, Republican, Republicans, Federal Trade Commission Locations: U.S

☆ A New Centrism Is Rising in Washington
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-19 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Republican Party has moved to the right by many measures, and the Democratic Party has moved to the left. One consequence of this polarization, politicians and pundits often say, is gridlock in Washington. These years have been arguably the most productive period of Washington bipartisanship in decades. After the bill’s passage, far-right House Republicans tried to oust Speaker Mike Johnson because he did not block it — and House Democrats voted to save Johnson’s job. Last week, the House advanced another bipartisan bill, on disaster relief, using a rare procedural technique to get around party-line votes.

Persons: Washington bipartisanship, Biden, Mike Johnson Organizations: Republican Party, Democratic Party, Republicans, Postal Service, Trump, House Democrats Locations: Washington, Ukraine

☆ How Israeli Extremists Won
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-16 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Last October, an Israeli settler in the West Bank set a Palestinian home on fire. And last fall, a settler shot a Palestinian in the stomach in front of an Israeli soldier. Yet the authorities have not charged any of these settlers — or others who have attacked West Bank residents — with crimes. In it, they document how violent factions within the settler movement have repeatedly received protection from the Israeli government despite attacks against Palestinians — and even against Israeli officials who tried to challenge the settlers. An Israeli government report in 1982 documented the problem, to no effect.

Persons: —, Ronen Bergman, Mark Mazzetti, ” Ronen, Mark, “ Organizations: West Bank, Times Magazine Locations: “, of Israel

☆ A New Rent-Versus-Buy Calculator
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-13 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

It is the biggest financial decision for many younger adults: Should I rent a home or buy one? To help people understand the trade-offs, The Times has just relaunched its popular rent-versus-buy calculator. The calculator, which The Times’s Upshot section built, has been updated in several important ways, including to take into account the 2017 tax law that affected the mortgage-interest deduction. Ultimately, the calculator can’t tell you whether you should rent or buy. That decision depends on the future paths of home prices and rents, which are unknowable.

Organizations: Times

☆ The Debate Over Rafah
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-10 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

At the heart of the dispute between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu over invading Rafah is a larger disagreement about what Israel can reasonably hope to accomplish against Hamas. Israel’s military has already made progress, having dismantled at least 18 of Hamas’s 24 battalions since the Oct. 7 attacks. But Hamas’s top leaders and thousands of fighters have survived, many evidently fleeing to tunnels under Rafah. “Ending the war without clearing out Rafah is like sending a firefighter to extinguish 80 percent of the fire,” Benny Gantz, a member of Israel’s war cabinet and Netanyahu’s chief political opponent, has told U.S. officials. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which tends to support Netanyahu, has called Rafah “the crucial city for the terrorist group’s future.”

Persons: Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu, I’ll, Netanyahu, ” Benny Gantz, ” Organizations: U.S Locations: Rafah, Israel

☆ Delay, Delay, Delay
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-29 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

And he directed state election officials to “find” him votes. Even so, Congress did not sanction him, and neither of the criminal trials related to his actions may even start before the 2024 election. Republican senatorsThe simplest path for addressing Trump’s attempts to overthrow an election was always in Congress. Congress has the power to impeach officials and bar them from holding office again, and it has used this power before. Most criminal convictions, by contrast, do not prevent somebody from holding office.

Persons: Donald Trump, Trump, Trump’s Organizations: Capitol, Republican, Democratic, Congress

☆ Chaos and Oppression
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-25 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect civilization. But his book has been influential because the framework often sheds light on political arguments. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire of students to denounce oppression.

Persons: Arnold Kling, Kling Organizations: Progressives, Columbia

☆ TikTok’s Pro-China Tilt
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Just a few months ago, it seemed unlikely that the U.S. government would force ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns TikTok, to sell it. The platform is popular, and Congress rarely passes legislation aimed at a single company. If ByteDance does not sell TikTok within 12 months, it will be banned in the United States. TikTok is also owned by a company based in the leading global rival of the United States. And that rival, especially under President Xi Jinping, treats private companies as extensions of the state.

Persons: TikTok, ByteDance, Biden, Xi Jinping, ” Christopher Wray Locations: Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel, United States

☆ Donald Trump on Trial
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-23 | by ( David Leonhardt | Ian Prasad Philbrick | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A criminal trial is often a contest between competing stories. In the trial of Donald Trump that’s just begun, prosecutors used their opening statement yesterday to tell a story about a man they say lied — and broke the law — to get elected president. The story that Trump’s lawyers offered in their own opening statements had two main features. Second, Trump’s lawyers argued that his attempts to affect the election were ordinary politics. “There’s nothing wrong with trying to influence an election,” Todd Blanche, one of Trump’s lawyers, said in his opening statement.

Persons: Donald Trump that’s, —, Trump, Michael Cohen, Trump’s, “, ” Todd Blanche, “ It’s, ”

☆ An Uneasy Arab-Israeli Alliance
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-18 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To understand the current confrontation between Iran and Israel, it helps to think about three recent phases of Middle East geopolitics. Phase 1: Before Oct. 7 of last year, Iran was arguably the most isolated power in the region. Israel, Iran’s longtime enemy, had signed a diplomatic deal during the Trump administration with Bahrain, Morocco and the U.A.E. Together, these developments pointed to the emergence of a broad alliance — among Arab countries, Israel, the U.S. and Western Europe — to check Iranian influence and aggression. Arab leaders condemned Israel, while the U.S. and other countries pressured Israeli leaders to reduce suffering in Gaza and devise an end to the war.

Persons: Biden, Iran’s, Trump Locations: Iran, Israel, East, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Morocco, . Iran, U.S, Europe, Gaza

☆ The New Great-Power Politics
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-12 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, have disrupted the global economy by firing on commercial ships traveling through the Red Sea. But the Houthis have made some exceptions: Ships from China and Russia are allowed to pass without being attacked. This policy, formalized with a diplomatic agreement last month, is the latest sign that the world has entered a new period of great power politics. On the other side are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as Iran-backed groups like the Houthis. These authoritarian powers “are more and more aligned,” Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, the Western alliance, told the BBC this week.

Persons: ” Jens Stoltenberg Organizations: NATO, BBC Locations: Iran, Yemen, China, Russia, United States, Japan, South Korea, Western Europe, Soviet Union, North Korea

☆ Iran’s Axis of Resistance
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-04 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Its members refer to it as the Axis of Resistance. The network’s name is a play on former President George W. Bush’s 2002 claim that Iran, Iraq and North Korea made up an Axis of Evil. The Axis of Resistance includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other groups, and both its strategy and its tactics have long been radical. Nonetheless, the conflict between the Axis and its enemies had remained limited for years. Even though Iran funds and supports the Axis, other countries have often treated its member groups as distinct from Iran.

Persons: George W Organizations: Hamas Locations: Iran, Israel, Iraq, North Korea, Yemen, America

☆ China, Russia and Trump
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-02 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

America’s biggest adversaries evidently want Donald Trump to win the 2024 presidential election. Some of the Chinese accounts impersonate fervent Trump fans, including one on X that purported to be “a father, husband and son” who was “MAGA all the way! !” The accounts mocked Mr. Biden’s age and shared fake images of him in a prison jumpsuit, or claimed that Mr. Biden was a Satanist pedophile while promoting Mr. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan. In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain what China and Russia hope to gain from a second Trump term. Trump has suggested that he will end this support.

Persons: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin’s, Trump, Tiffany Hsu, Steven Lee Myers, Donald J, Biden, Biden …, ”, “ MAGA, Mr, Trump’s, Putin Organizations: Trump Locations: Beijing, China, Russia, Ukraine

☆ A New Game from The Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-24 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

I still hear from readers who learned about the Connections game from this newsletter and now play it every day. Today, I want to tell you about The Times’s newest game, called Strands. In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through a puzzle from this past week — and then link to today’s, so you can try for yourself. The second letter can be above the first letter, while the third letter might be at a diagonal from the second. You begin in the very corner, go across to the H, down to the I and over to the S:

☆ The Realtors’ Big Defeat
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-18 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Free-market economic theory suggests that the American real estate market should not have been able to exist as it has for decades. Americans have long paid unusually high commissions to real estate agents. Some real estate brokers, recognizing the chance to win business by charging lower commissions, would have done so. Instead, an average home sale in the U.S. has cost between $5,000 and $15,000 more than it would have without the inflated commissions. This money has been akin to a tax, collected by real estate agents instead of the government.

Locations: U.S, Germany, Australia, Britain

☆ What Groups Need Affirmative Action?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-15 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

To do so, Abramitzky and Boustan collected millions of tax filings, census records and other data and analyzed upward mobility over time. As in the past, immigrants themselves tend to remain poor if they arrive poor, as many do. Within a generation or two, immigrant families resemble native families in economic terms. Overall upward mobility has declined sharply. For a mix of reasons — including their willingness to move to U.S. regions with strong economies — immigrant families have kept climbing society’s ladder.

Persons: — Ran Abramitzky, Leah Boustan, Princeton —, ”, Boustan Organizations: Stanford, Princeton, Immigrants Locations: United States, Gold, Asia, Latin America, Italy, Russia, U.S

☆ Should China Own TikTok?
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-13 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

After Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attack, TikTok flooded users with videos expressing extreme positions from both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tilted toward the Palestinian side, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. On Monday, the top U.S. intelligence official released a report saying that the Chinese government had used TikTok to promote its propaganda to Americans and to influence the 2022 midterm elections. TikTok is also owned by a company, ByteDance, that’s based in a country that is America’s biggest rival for global power: China. ByteDance executives say that they operate separately from China’s government and that they regularly remove misleading content from TikTok. The most likely scenario, experts say, is that officials aligned with the Chinese government shape TikTok’s algorithm to influence what content Americans see.

Persons: Jeanna Smialek, Jim Tankersley, “, Sapna Maheshwari, China’s, Xi Jinping, Xi Organizations: Rutgers University, Rutgers, Communist Party, Soviet NBC Locations: U.S, Tibet, Hong Kong, United States, China, Soviet

☆ The Fourth Anniversary of the Covid Pandemic
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-11 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Shortly after noon Eastern on March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared Covid — or “the coronavirus,” then the more popular term — to be a global pandemic. The worst pandemic in a century had begun. Today, on the unofficial fourth anniversary, I’ll update you on where things stand. The true tollCovid’s confirmed death toll — more than seven million people worldwide — is horrific on its own, and the true toll is much worse. The Economist magazine keeps a running estimate of excess deaths, defined as the number of deaths above what was expected from pre-Covid trends.

Persons: Covid, ”, Stocks, Donald Trump, Tom Hanks Organizations: World Health Organization, Economist

☆ A Trans-Atlantic Crackdown
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( David Leonhardt | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In today’s newsletter, I want to help you understand the emerging crackdown on big technology companies. The European Union yesterday imposed a $2 billion fine on Apple, and regulators in the U.S. are pursuing cases against Amazon, Google, Facebook and perhaps Apple. These legal cases are often complex, and I know that some readers find them hard to follow. In the book, Wu used a term — “the cycle” — to describe what happened after a new form of communication arrived, be it the telephone, radio or internet. In the early days of radio, amateur stations proliferated, much as the early internet was quirky and offered few opportunities for profit.

Persons: Tim Wu, Wu Organizations: Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook Locations: U.S

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